Socialism: A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles Part 2

We may admit that there is a good deal of overemphasis in this statement, but the doctrine itself does not seem strange or sensational to-day. It might be promulgated in any fashionable church, or in any ministerial conference, without exciting more than a languid, pa.s.sing interest. But in Owen's time it was far otherwise. Such a doctrine struck at the very roots of current theology and all that organized Christianity consciously stood for. It denied the doctrine of the freedom of the will, upon which the elaborate theology of the church rested. No wonder, then, that it brought much bitter denunciation upon the heads of its promulgators. A poet of the period, in a poem dedicated to Owen, aptly expresses the doctrine in somewhat prosaic verse:--

"We are the creatures of external things, Acting on inward organs, and are made To think and do whate'er our tutors please.

What folly, then, to punish or reward For deeds o'er which we never held a curb!

What woeful ignorance, to teach the crime And then chastise the pupil for his guilt!"[25]

Owen learned other things at New Lanark besides the truth that character is formed largely by environment. Starting out with no other purpose than to ameliorate the conditions of his work people, he realized before many years had pa.s.sed that he could never do for them the one essential thing--secure their real liberty. "The people were slaves of my mercy,"

he writes.[26] He saw, though but dimly at first, that no man could be free who depended upon another for the right to earn his bread, no matter how good the bread-master might be. The hopelessness of expecting reform from the manufacturers themselves was painfully forced upon him.

First of all, there was the bitter hostility of those of his cla.s.s who had no sympathy with his philanthropic ideas, manifested from the beginning of his agitation at Manchester. Then there was the incessant conflict with his own a.s.sociates, who, though they represented the n.o.blest and best elements of the manufacturing cla.s.s, constantly opposed him and regarded as dangerous and immoral his belief in the inherent right of every child to the opportunities of sound physical, mental, and moral culture. Cla.s.s consciousness had not yet become a recognized term in sociological discussions, but cla.s.s consciousness, the instinctive conformity of thought and action with cla.s.s interests, was a fact which confronted Owen at every step.

The Luddite riots of 1810-1811 awakened England to the importance of the labor question, and Owen, who since 1805 had been devoting much time to its study, secured a wider audience and a much more serious hearing than ever before. Then came the frightful misery of 1815, due to the crisis which the end of the great war produced. Every one seemed to think that when the war was over and peace restored, there would be a tremendous increase in prosperity. What happened was precisely the opposite; for a time at least things were immeasurably worse than before. Peace did not bring with it plenty, but penury.

Owen, more clearly than any other man of the time, explained the real nature of the crisis. The war had given an important spur to industry and encouraged many new inventions and chemical discoveries. "The war was the great and most extravagant customer of farmers, manufacturers, and other producers of wealth, and many during this period became very wealthy.... And on the day on which peace was signed, the great customer of the producers died, and prices fell as the demand diminished, until the prime cost of the articles required for war could not be obtained.... Barns and farmyards were full, warehouses loaded, and such was our artificial state of society that this very superabundance of wealth was the sole cause of the existing distress. _Burn the stock in the farmyards and warehouses, and prosperity would immediately recommence, in the same manner as if the war had continued._ This want of demand at remunerating prices compelled the master producers to consider what they could do to diminish the amount of their productions and the cost of producing until these surplus stocks could be taken out of the market. To effect these results, every economy in producing was resorted to, and men being more expensive machines for producing than mechanical and chemical inventions and discoveries so extensively brought into action during the war, the men were discharged and the machines were made to supersede them--while the numbers of the unemployed were increased by the discharge of men from the army and navy. Hence the great distress for want of work among all cla.s.ses whose labor was so much in demand while the war continued. This increase of mechanical and chemical power was continually diminishing the demand for, and value of, manual labor, and would continue to do so, and would effect great changes throughout society."[27]

In this statement there are several points worthy of attention. In the first place, the a.n.a.lysis of the crisis of 1815 is very like the later a.n.a.lyses of commercial crises by the Marxists; secondly, the antagonism of cla.s.s interests is clearly developed, so far as the basic interests of the employers and their employees are concerned. The former, in order to conserve their interests, have to dismiss the workers, thus forcing them into the direst poverty. Thirdly, the conflict between manual labor and machine production is frankly stated. Owen's studies were leading him from mere philanthropism to Socialism.

During the height of the distress of 1815, Owen called together a large number of cotton manufacturers at a conference, held in Glasgow, to consider the state of the cotton trade and the prevailing distress. He proposed (1) that they should pet.i.tion Parliament for the repeal of the revenue tariff on raw cotton; (2) that they should call upon Parliament to shorten the hours of labor in the cotton mills by legislative enactment, and otherwise seek to improve the condition of the working people. The first proposition was carried with unanimity, but the second, and to Owen the more important, did not even secure a seconder.[28] The conference plainly showed the power of cla.s.s interests. The spirit in which Owen faced his fellow-manufacturers is best seen in the following extract from the address delivered by him, with copies of which he afterward literally deluged the kingdom:--

"True, indeed, it is that the main pillar and prop of the political greatness and prosperity of our country is a manufacture which, as now carried on, is destructive of the health, morals, and social comfort of the ma.s.s of people engaged in it. It is only since the introduction of the cotton trade that children, at an age before they had acquired strength or mental instruction, have been forced into cotton mills,--those receptacles, in too many instances, for living human skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect, where, as the business is often now conducted, they linger out a few years of miserable existence, acquiring every bad habit which they may disseminate throughout society.

It is only since the introduction of this trade that children and even grown people were required to labor more than twelve hours in a day, not including the time allotted for meals. It is only since the introduction of this trade that the sole recreation of the laborer is to be found in the pot-house or ginshop, and it is only since the introduction of this baneful trade that poverty, crime, and misery have made rapid and fearful strides throughout the community.

"Shall we then go unblushingly and ask the legislators of our country to pa.s.s legislative acts to sanction and increase this trade--to sign the death warrants of the strength, morals, and happiness of thousands of our fellow-creatures, and not attempt to propose corrections for the evils which it creates? If such shall be your determination, I, for one, will not join in the application,--no, I will, with all the faculties I possess, oppose every attempt made to extend the trade that, except in name, is more injurious to those employed in it than is the slavery in the West Indies to the poor negroes; for deeply as I am interested in the cotton manufacture, highly as I value the extended political power of my country, yet knowing as I do, from long experience both here and in England, the miseries which this trade, as it is now conducted, inflicts on those to whom it gives employment, I do not hesitate to say: _Perish the cotton trade, perish even the political superiority of our country, if it depends on the cotton trade, rather than that they shall be upheld by the sacrifice of everything valuable in life._"[29]

This conference doubtless had much to do with Owen's acceptance of a communistic ideal approaching that of modern Socialism in many important respects. It certainly intensified the hatred and fear of those manufacturers whose interests he had so courageously attacked. In 1817 we find him proposing to the British government the establishment of communistic villages, as the best means of remedying the terrible distress which prevailed at that time. From this time onward his interest in mere surface reforms such as he had been carrying on at New Lanark seemed to wane. He became at this juncture an apostle of Communism, or as he later preferred to say, Socialism. His ideal was a cooperative world, with perfect equality between the s.e.xes. He had completely demonstrated to his own mind that private property was incompatible with social well-being. Every month of his experience at New Lanark had deeply impressed him with the conviction that to make it possible for all people to live equally happy and moral lives they must have equal material resources and conditions of life, and he could not understand why it had never occurred to others before him.

Here we have the essential characteristic of Utopian Socialism as distinguished from modern, or scientific, Socialism. The Utopians regard human life as something plastic and capable of being shaped and molded according to systems and plans. All that is necessary is to take some abstract principle as a standard, and then prepare a plan for the reorganization of society in conformity with that principle. If the plan is perfect, it will be enough to demonstrate its advantages as one would demonstrate a sum in arithmetic. The scientific Socialists, on the other hand, are evolutionists. Society, they believe, cannot take leaps at will; social changes are products of the past and the present. They distrust social inventors and schemes. Socialism is not an ingenious plan for the realization of abstract Justice, or Brotherhood, but a necessary outgrowth of the centuries. Owen, then, was a Utopian. He regarded himself as one inspired, an inspired inventor of a new social system, and believed that it was only necessary for him to demonstrate the truth of his contentions and theories, by argument and practical experiment, to bring about the transformation of the world. He conducted a tremendous propaganda, by means of newspapers, pamphlets, lectures, and debates, and established various communities in England and this country. In face of a bitter opposition and repeated failure, he kept on with sublime faith and unbounded courage which nothing could shake.

In 1825 Owen began the greatest and most splendid of his social experiments in the village of Harmonie, Indiana, in the beautiful valley of the Wabash. The place had already been the theater of an interesting experiment in religious communism, Owen having bought the property from the Rappites. In February and March, 1825, the brave reformer addressed two of the most distinguished audiences ever gathered in the Hall of Representatives at the national capital. In the audiences were the President of the United States, the Judges of the Supreme Court, several members of the cabinet, and almost the entire membership of both houses of Congress. Owen explained his plans for the regeneration of society in detail, exhibiting a model of the buildings to be erected. It is almost impossible to realize at this day the tremendous interest which his appeal to Congress awakened. His vision of a re-created world caught the popular imagination.

Among those whose minds were fired was a boy of sixteen, tall, lank, uncouth, and poor. Word had come to him of Owen's splendid undertaking, and he had caught something of the enthusiasm of the great dreamer.

Above all, it was said that New Harmony was to be a wonderful center of learning, that the foremost educators of the world would establish great schools there, fully equipped with books and all sorts of appliances. To be a scholar had been the boy's one great ambition, so he yearned wistfully for an opportunity to join the new community. But his father forbidding, claiming his services, the boy suffered grievous disappointment. One wonders what effect residence at New Harmony would have had upon the life of Abraham Lincoln, and upon the history of America! And how much, one wonders, was that splendid life influenced by that boyish interest in the regeneration of the world?

That the influence of New Harmony was felt by Lincoln we know. It was a child of New Harmony, Robert Dale Owen, son of Robert Owen, who, when emanc.i.p.ation seemed to hang in the balance, penned his remarkable letter to President Lincoln, dated September seventeenth, 1862. "Its perusal thrilled me like a trumpet call," said the great President. Five days after its receipt the Preliminary Proclamation was issued. "Your letter to the President had more influence on him than any other doc.u.ment which reached him on the subject--I think I might say than all others put together. I speak of that which I know from personal conference with him," wrote Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury.

New Harmony failed. Other communities established by Owen failed, but the story of their failure is nevertheless full of inspiration. The world has long since written the word "Failure" as an epitaph for Robert Owen. But what a splendid failure that life was! Standing by his grave one day, in the picturesque little churchyard at Newton, by a bend of the winding river, not far from the ruins of the ancient castle home of the famous Deist, Lord Herbert, the writer said to an old Welsh laborer, "But his life was a failure, was it not?" The old man gazed awhile at the grave, and then with a voice of unforgettable reverence and love answered, "I suppose it was, sir, as the world goes; a failure like Jesus Christ's. But I don't call it failure, sir. He established infant schools; he founded the great cooperative movement; he helped to make the trade unions;[30] he helped to give us the factory acts; he worked for peace between two great countries. His Socialism has not been realized yet, nor has Christ's--but it will come!"

V

Owen was not the only builder of Utopias in his time. In the same year that Owen launched his New Harmony venture, there died in Paris another dreamer of social millenniums, a gentle mystic, Henry de Saint-Simon, and in 1837, the year of Owen's third Socialist congress, another great Utopist died in the French capital, Charles Fourier. Each of these contributed something to the development of the theories of Socialism, each has a legitimate place in the history of the Socialist movement.

But this little work is not intended to give the history of Socialism.[31] I have taken only one of the three great Utopists, as representative of them all: one who seems to me to be much nearer to the later scientific movement pioneered by Marx and Engels than any of the others. In the Socialism of Owen, we have Utopian Socialism at its best.

What distinguishes the Utopian Socialists from their scientific successors we have already noted. Engels expresses the principle very clearly in the following luminous pa.s.sage: "One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had ... produced. Like the French philosophers,[32] they do not claim to emanc.i.p.ate a particular cla.s.s to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as heaven from earth from that of the French philosophers.

"For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dust hole quite as readily, as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice had not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born five hundred years earlier, and might then have spared humanity five hundred years of error, strife, and suffering."[33]

Neither of these great Utopists had anything like the conception of social evolution, determined by economic conditions and the resulting conflicts of economic cla.s.ses, which const.i.tutes the base of the philosophy of the scientific Socialists. Each of them had some faint comprehension of isolated facts, but neither of them developed his knowledge very far, nor could the facts appear to them as correlated later by Marx. Saint-Simon, as we know, recognized the cla.s.s struggle in the French Revolution, and saw in the Reign of Terror only the momentary reign of the non-possessing ma.s.ses;[34] he saw, too, that the political question was fundamentally an economic question, declaring that politics is the science of production, and prophesying that politics would be absorbed by economics.[35] Fourier, we also know, applied the principle of evolution to society. He divided the history of society into four great epochs--savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, and civilization.[36] But just as Saint-Simon failed to grasp the significance of the cla.s.s conflict, and its relation to the fundamental character of economic inst.i.tutions, which he dimly perceived, so Fourier failed to grasp the significance of the evolutionary process which he described, and, like Saint-Simon, he halted upon the brink, so to speak, of an important discovery. His concept of social evolution meant little to him and possessed only an academic interest. And Owen, in many respects the greatest of the three, realized in a practical manner that the industrial problem was a cla.s.s conflict. Not only had he found in 1815 that pity was powerless to move the hearts of his fellow-manufacturers when their cla.s.s interests were concerned, but later, in 1818, when he went to present his famous memorial to the Congress of Sovereigns at Aix-la-Chapelle, he had another lesson of the same kind. At Frankfort, Germany, he tarried on his way to the Congress, and was invited to attend a notable dinner to meet the Secretary of the Congress, M. Gentz, a famous diplomat of the day, "who enjoyed the full confidence of the leading despots of Europe." After Owen had outlined his schemes for social amelioration, M. Gentz was asked for his reply, and Owen tells us that the diplomat answered, "We know very well that what you say is true, but how could we govern the ma.s.ses, if they were wealthy, and so, independent of us?"[37] Lord Lauderdale, too, had exclaimed on another occasion, "Nothing [_i.e._ than Owen's plans] could be more complete for the poor and working cla.s.ses, but what will become of us?"[38] Scattered throughout Owen's writings and speeches are numerous evidences that he at times recognized the cla.s.s antagonisms in industrial society as the heart of the industrial problem,[39] but to him, also, the germ of an important truth meant practically nothing. He saw only the facts in their isolation, and made no attempt to discover their meaning or to relate them to his teaching.

Each of the three men regarded himself as the discoverer of the truth which would redeem the world; each devoted himself with magnificent faith and heroic courage to his task; each failed to realize his hopes; and each left behind him faithful disciples and followers, confident that the day must come at last when the suffering and disinherited of earth will be able to say, in Owen's dying words, "Relief has come."

Perhaps no better estimate of the value of the visions of these great Utopists has ever been penned than that by Emerson in the following tribute to Owen:[40]--

"Robert Owen of New Lanark came hither from England in 1845 to read lectures or hold conversations wherever he could find listeners--the most amiable, sanguine, and candid of men. He had not the least doubt that he had hit on the plan of right and perfect Socialism, or that mankind would adopt it. He was then seventy years old, and being asked, 'Well, Mr. Owen, who is your disciple? how many men are there possessed of your views who will remain after you are gone to put them in practice?' 'Not one,' was the reply. Robert Owen knew Fourier in his old age. He said that Fourier learned of him all the truth that he had. The rest of his system was imagination, and the imagination of a visionary.

Owen made the best impression by his rare benevolence. His love of men made us forget his 'three errors.' His charitable construction of men and their actions was invariable. He was the better Christian in his controversies with Christians.

"And truly I honor the generous ideas of the Socialists, the magnificence of their theories, and the enthusiasm with which they have been urged. They appeared inspired men of their time. Mr. Owen preached his doctrine of labor and reward with the fidelity and devotion of a saint in the slow ears of his generation.

"One feels that these philosophers have skipped no fact but one, namely, life. They treat man as a plastic thing, or something that may be put up or down, ripened or r.e.t.a.r.ded, molded, polished, made into solid or fluid or gas at the will of the leader; or perhaps as a vegetable, from which, though now a very poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced--and skip the faculty of life which sp.a.w.ns and spurns systems and system makers; which eludes all conditions; which makes or supplants a thousand Phalanxes and New Harmonies with each pulsation....

"Yet, in a day of small, sour and fierce schemes, one is admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims, and of such bold and generous proportions; there is an intellectual courage and strength in it which is superior and commanding; it certifies the presence of so much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact.

"I regard these philanthropists as themselves the effects of the age in which they live, in common with so many other good facts the efflorescence of the period and predicting the good fruit that ripens.

They were not the creators that they believed themselves to be; but they were unconscious prophets of the true state of society, one which the tendencies of nature lead unto, one which always establishes itself for the sane soul, though not in that manner in which they paint it."

"Our visions have not come to naught, Who saw by lightning in the night; The deeds we dreamed are being wrought By those who work in clearer light; In other ways our fight is fought, And other forms fulfill our thought Made visible to all men's sight."[41]

FOOTNOTES:

[10] _Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs_, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, page 101.

[11] _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, by F. Engels, London, 1892, pages 20-25.

[12] For good accounts of the life of Owen the reader is referred to the Biography, by Lloyd Jones, in _The Social Science Series_, 1890, published by Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., London, and the _Life of Robert Owen_, by Frank Podmore, 2 vols., New York, 1907.

[13] _The Industrial History of England_, by H. de B. Gibbins, London, Methuen and Co.

[14] _Industrial History of England_, page 179.

[15] This anonymous historian is now known to have been Mr. Samuel Kydd, barrister-at-law (_vide_ Cooke-Taylor).

[16] _The Factory System and the Factory Acts_, by R. W. Cooke-Taylor, London, 1894.

[17] In two volumes: London, Effingham Wilson, 1857 and 1858. Vol. I contains the Life; Vol. II is a Supplementary Appendix. Quotations are from Vol. I.

[18] See _Songs of Freedom_, by H. S. Salt, pages 81-83.

[19] _Industrial History of England_, page 181.

[20] _Capital_, by Karl Marx, Vol. I, page 467, Kerr edition.

[21] _Idem_, Vol. I, page 468.

[22] _Capital_, Vol. I, page 468.

[23] For instance, he so improved the machinery and increased the fineness of the threads that, instead of spinning seventy-five thousand yards of yarn to the pound of cotton, he spun two hundred and fifty thousand! At that time a pound of cotton, which in its raw state was worth $1.25, became worth $50 when spun.--_Life of Robert Owen_, Philadelphia, 1866.--_Anonymous._